Support this Site

Become a member and get access to a bonus podcast, newsletter, and community.

By Dan Moren

June 4, 2015 11:33 AM PT

Tweetbot 2.0 for Mac

Tweetbot (left) and the new Tweetbot 2.0 (right)

When it comes to iOS, there’s an embarrassment of riches for third-party Twitter clients; OS X has somewhat fewer options, but still plenty of great ones, and my app of choice, Tapbot’s Tweetbot, has gotten a massive overhaul today, in the form of version 2.0. It’s a free update via the Mac App Store, or $13 for new users.

I switched to Tweetbot several years ago from Twitterrific.1. While the iOS app has gotten a number of updates, the Mac version has grown increasingly long in the tooth, especially in light of the design changes Apple introduced last year in OS X Yosemite.

The look of the new Tweetbot is the biggest front-facing feature of the new app; it’s taken on a flat aesthetic that better fits with OS X’s new design, including round avatar images by default. (If that change induces too much anxiety, there’s an option to switch back to rounded rectangles.)

Functionally, Tweetbot’s features are more or less the same in version 2.0, though the Retweets tab has been removed from the sidebar and the ability to set a list as your primary timeline is now hidden, accessible only by control-clicking on the titlebar. Managing multiple columns is a little clearer now, as there’s a column icon in the bottom left (confusingly, it used to be controlled with a gear icon in the bottom right) and it lets you quickly open frequently used columns. My favorite tweak is that there’s now a search icon for your timeline in the titlebar itself; you could always hit command-F to bring it up, but this makes it more transparent.

There’s still no support for Twitter’s new native quoting scheme in 2.0, though it is available in Tweetbot for iOS. However, one of Tapbots’s developers says it’s coming in the next update. (I’d also like to see a dark mode, as on the iOS app. But maybe that’s just me.)

Overall, for me the trickiest change to get used to is the new icon, which trades out Tweetbot’s old duck-style icon for a square one that more closely resembles the iOS app’s. I suppose it’s better for cross-platform recognition, but the old icon stood out, and I keep overlooking the new one when I go to click on it in the Dock.

I know Jason is still a diehard Twitterrific user. I own it for both iOS and OS X, and retain a great deal of fondness for it, even if it isn’t my day-to-day client. ↩